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Benjamin Franklin THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO BENJAMIN FRANKLIN EDITED BY CARLA MULFORD CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS c·AM~=~.U~!L.sJ.ItlRES S Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8Ru, UK Published in the United Stares of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/978052I69I864 © Cambridge University Press 2008 This ·publicatiön is in copyright. Subiect to statutorv exceotion and .;. t~·;tbe1Wpri~ipns of relevant collective licensing agreements, 1 00,~eproduction of any part may take place without the; S't~t!;~ermission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2008 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British ·Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data The Cambridge companion to Benjamin Franklin I edited by Carla Mulford. p. cm. - (Cambridge companions to American studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-o-52I-87I34-I (hardback) I. Franklin, Benjamin, I706-I790 - Political and social views. 2. Franklin, Benjamin, I706-I790 - Knowledge and learning. 3. Franklin, Benjamin, I706-I790 - Influence. 4. Statesmen - United States - Biography. 5. Scientists - United Stares - Biography. 6. United Stares - lntellectual life - I 8th century. 1. Mulford, Carla, I 9 5 5- II. Tide: Companion to Benjamin Franklin. III. Series. E302.6.F8C2I8 2008 973.3092-dc22 (B] 2008033470 ISBN 978-o-52I-87I34-I hardback ISBN 978-o-52I-69I86-4 paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party interner websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. ,,...__ 6 FRANK KELLETER Franklin and the Enlightenment 1 Franklin and his contemporaries may never have seen themselves as members of a unified intellectual movement, but they did believe that their world was historically distinct in a number of ways. The term reason, contested as it was in the eighteenth century, widely served to signify this sense of distance from earlier periods. The same is true for the name, Benjamin Frank/in, which came to stand for all sorts of things but almost always symbolized the promise or threat of a new age of human autonomy. "Had Franklin drawn lightning from the clouds [three hundred years ago]," Thomas Paine noted in The Age of Reason (1794), "it would have been at the hazard of expiring for it in the flames." 1 Paine implied that in the Middle Ages, Franklin's scientific discoveries - his disenchantment of nature - would have challenged the authority of the Catholic church, and he might have been burned at the stake. Yet in his own enlightened times, Franklin was seen as a representative man of his age, and his discoveries and inventions symbolized social and political revolutions of the highest magnitude, as in Turgot's popular witticism, "[Franklin] seized the lightning from the sky, and the sceptre from tyrants." 2 Modem readers are duly suspicious of such utopian pronouncements. In hindsight, they recognize that the Enlightenment never existed as a homoge­ nous set of ideas or as a coherent ideological program. Instead, opposing understandings of enlightened thought and action coexisted, not always peacefully. Different schools and creeds formed rigid antagonisms, surpris­ ing coalitions, new mixtures. The Enlightenment was obviously not the sum total of its constituent parts - empiricism, deism, moral-sense philoso­ phy, economic liberalism, republicanism, revolutionary utopianism, and so forth - because these parts don't add up. Nevertheless, we can speak of the Enlightenment once we recognize that under this heading, disparate forces interacted in a common attempt to redefine the meaning of human reason. 77 FRANK KELLETER Franklin and the Enlightenment The Enlightenment, in other words, did not exist as a set of shared beliefs Common-sense philosophy combined the democratic and the critical and convictions, but it produced shared ways of arguing a point as rational. aspects of enlightened reason. lt argued that truth is always plain. Peo­ Thus, whatever ideological stance it took, enlightened reason always ple require no superior intellect to understand what is true. Nevertheless, it regarded itself as a critical, democratic, and constructive faculty. Reason was held that most people are actually unable to discern pl;iin truth, because was considered a critical faculty because it attempted to free human under­ they have never learned to trust their own senses. Instead, they unthinkingly standing from d6xa or opinion. That is, reason freed human understanding subscribe to established opinions (what contemporaries called "prejudices") from "that Assent, which we give to any Proposition as true, of whose Truth or to the doctrines canonized by powerful institutions. Franklin reacted to yet we have no certain Knowledge" (John Locke).3 Hence, to exercise one's this dilemma in the same manner as did John Locke and Immanuel Kant: he reason in an enlightened manner did not simply mean to speak the truth; it maintained that all received knowledge could and must be tested empirically. meant to eliminate a falsely established belief. Even more: to exercise one's Knowledge needed to be examined by one's own senses and reason and not reason meant to speak and act against all authorities that had an interest in accepted as what other people teil us or what we can read in books, even if perpetuating falsehood. To exercise one's reaso~ meant to distrust the offi­ thncP nrPrP u.rrittPn crrP"'.lt" nhiJncnnhPrc.:. ,,... inctP!'.lrl nf hPfiP11- ------ hnnlrc------ ·· --- --------- hu-.1 o----- r-------r------ -- --------- --- cimnlv- r " cial pronouncements of ruling powers and elites. Along these lines, to read ing that lightning is an articulation of God's wrath (as eminent theologians Greek or to be a good rhetorician did not make a person more reasonable asserted) we need to examine lightning with our own eyes - and we will come but more powerful. Consequently, when Franklin proposed the solution to to different conclusions. Transferred to the political realm, this "courage to a specific problem in physics (in a letter to John Perkins), he concluded: think for oneself," as Kant called it, had far-reaching consequences.4 Sud­ "If my Hypothesis is not the Truth itself, it is least as naked: For I have denly, no power on earth was exempt from critical scrutiny. not ... disguis'd my Nonsense in Greek, cloth'd it in Algebra, or adorn'd it Franklin symbolized this democratic aspect of enlightened reason in more with Fluxions" (P 4: 442). than one way. When he claimed that it is more important to know what Enlightened knowledge, Franklin implies, exists independently of the a man can do than where he comes from, he was essentially talking about "schools," independently, that is, of scholastic learning and, in this case, himself, both as a self-made man and as an American. Franklin's popularity mathematical training. In Franklin's times, to be reasonable did not mean among European (especially French) intellectuals in the eighteenth century to be more intelligent or more learned than the next man, but it meant to had everything to do with his marginal status as a colonial. After all, there free oneself from dogmatic beliefs. Thus, the exercise of one's reason was was something inherently provincial in the Enlightenment's conviction that not simply an act of confirmation. On the contrary, people like Franklin truth is a matter of common sense and free public deliberation, and not a almost habitually suspected that official censure is always directed against matter of divine inspiration, social standing, or scholastic training. Franklin truth. Looking back on his youthful conversion to deism (that is, to a post­ shrewdly exploited this topos when he went to Versailles dressed as a back­ Christian brand of enlightened religion), he noted in The Autobiography woodsman. In this manner, Dr. Franklin, the beaver-hatted member of the that he took this step because "[s]ome Books against Deism feil into my Royal Medical Society in Paris, came to embody the worldwide common­ Hands ... lt happened that they wrought an Effect on me quite contrary ality of enlightened reason: an American, a wilderness philosopher, solves to what was intended by them" (A rr3-14, emphasis added). Not just the some of the most difficult problems of European science - what better proof veracity but the ill repute of deism convinced him to become "a thorough for the universality of human reason! Deist." Far from being a merely affirmative or contemplative faculty, enlight­ Enlightened reason was not based on wisdom, tradition, or authoritative ened reason saw and presented itself as a force that actively shapes and institutionalization. lt is in this sense that enlightened reason was considered improves human living conditions. Enlightened reason is thus a constructive not only a critical but also a democratic faculty - even though that was not faculty. In this view, to understand nature ultimately means to domesticate the term used by Franklin and his contemporaries. Indeed, the word democ­ nature. And to domesticate nature - to seize the lightning from the sky - racy for most of them had a pejorative meaning, connoting demagoguery means to construct new possibilities and environments for human life in and mob-rule. Instead, they spoke of democratic reason as common sense, the service of communal, perhaps even universal, well-being. Enlightened a sense of reason common to all people, regardless of social status and ideologies may fight over the actual features of these rational environments educational background. and over the ways to get there, but they share a fundamental optimism 78 79 FRANK KELLETER Franklin and the Enlightenment concerning the malleability of human society (though not concerning the the dominance of utilitarian thought in Franklin's version of the Enlighten­ goodness of human nature).
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